Random drawings

2020 was, of course, an odd year. As soon as I knew a lockdown would happen, I tried to ensure I had sufficient emergency art materials to keep me going for months. Oddly, I don’t have enough decent drawing paper, and managed to lose my tin of watercolour pencils (though I have various loose ones in a sketching pencil case that I used to carry in my bag with a sketchbook in case I decided to sketch while out).

It was difficult to concentrate enough to paint so I tried doing some drawings for a while. I gave away two or three of the drawings to thank people for helping me.

I was going to try to draw daily but was too distracted by world events and a leak in my roof to achieve that lofty aim.

Tapas jug print

The idea of trying a three-plate relief solar plate print in cyan, magenta and yellow had been floating around in my head for a while.

I had liked the little postcard-sized print I had made for the international print exchange in the summer of 2016. That had been a two-plate relief solar plate print, combining the yellow and magenta layers into one plate, and cyan and black layers into a second plate, and printed in translucent orange and ultramarine blue.

The little tapas jug had caught my eye in a sale. Its suggestion of Mediterranean holidays and the strong colours made me think of some of the flowers in my garden which grow wild in places such as South and Central America. The flowers and the little jug were like a colourful souvenir of the holidays in exotic places that I never had and never will have. I’ve been away on very few holidays in my adult life, and haven’t been abroad since my 20s.

What seemed like a simple still life composition took more work than I expected to simplify it to the point it would work as a print. I was going to work from the photograph originally but ended up creating a drawing and then smoothing that out on the computer.

Once I had an image that worked, I split the colour channels on the computer, discarding the black layer, and then turned each layer (cyan, magenta and yellow), into a half-tone image. I wanted to push the image by having big dots, arranging them in different directions, to the point where some colours might not read easily. The 3 colour layers, now black and white, were inverted and printed onto an acetate-type film to create negatives.

I put these negatives against solar plates and exposed them in the light box. Once exposed to the light, I washed each one in water for a few minutes and then dried it. The light areas of the negatives were hardened by the light and the dark areas were washed away by the water.

Inking up proved harder than I’d expected. I kept getting ink on the parts where it wasn’t supposed to be. I really needed 2 runners of unexposed plate the same length as the longest size to put either side of the plate to support the roller.

I printed each layer separately first to check the plates.

I tried putting the magenta and yellow together, and then all three plates. I found that I hadn’t allowed enough paper to keep the paper trapped under the roller while I swapped plates, and  managed to get one plate the wrong way round on one print (despite writing ‘top’ on the paper underneath and on the back of the plate).

I experimented a bit with deliberately off-setting the plates a little as well as trying to get them lined up as closely as possible. I find it quite fascinating how the slightest shift, just a millimetre or two, can change the colours.

It was the end of the day, arthritis was flaring up in my hands, and we had to be out of the studio within minutes so I rather anxiously decided on which print to submit for Northern Print’s Northern Footprints show (not shown here – I didn’t have time or sufficient light to photograph it properly). I was concerned that it wasn’t good enough.

Weeks later, I was so surprised to hear my name read out as the winner of the Reid Framing Purchase Prize at the Northern Footprints preview that I started to look round for the other Janet Davis who must have won it. I was delighted, of course, once it sank in that it really was my print that had been selected.

From this I learned that I’m not the best judge of my own work, especially when I’m exhausted. I will do some more solar plate prints. They’re not the cheapest type of plates but I do like the process.

 

 

Another drypoint experiment

Ragged robin drypoint print with deep pink ink added with brush.

Ragged robin drypoint print with deep pink ink added with brush.

Ragged robin drypoint print with deep pink ink added with brush.

Ragged robin drypoint print.

It took me half the day to measure and tear the paper – but I was also preparing paper for a future day (or 2) in the studio. Since I hadn’t had enough time to prepare a new plate, I decided to try a different way of printing the last 2 drypoint plates I’d made. I inked them up with etching ink in the usual way (I scrape ink into the lines and then wipe with scrim), but then painted on some relief ink which I had thinned further with some thin plate oil.

The first attempt at the ragged robin print was rather messy. I realised that there was a loose hair in the brush (which I removed) and a couple of hairs that stuck out at an angle (so I tried to use the other side of the brush). The brushes I use for acrylics might work better for applying the ink. The deep pink wasn’t quite the colour I wanted. Thinking about it afterwards, I realised that I probably need to use more extender to make the deep pink colour more translucent and therefore a bit lighter.

Butterfly on blackthorn blossom.

Butterfly on blackthorn blossom.

Butterfly on blackthorn blossom.

I tried brushing the orange of the butterfly on lightly on the paler areas on the first but that just looked a bit messy on the print. It seemed to work better with a less tentative approach and leaving the lighter areas without any ink. I think the butterfly works better. I will do some more of those.

Although I was a bit frustrated that I got little printing done and that it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, I did learn something from it. I also enjoyed the day. It was a busy day in the studio, with three other people using it, and a couple of groups of visitors on guided tours.  I’d already met a couple of my fellow printmakers before, and It was lovely to have a chat now and then as we worked, sharing knowledge of printmaking or getting artwork seen.

Now I need to think of what subject my 20:20 print should be. This is a print exchange scheme between different studios, and I need to make an edition of 25 (20 x 20 cms each) within the next few weeks. I want to make prints that most people might like but can’t think what the subject should be.

3 pink anemones in an oriental vase

Selecting the subject

When I was shopping for groceries one evening, I noticed that some bunches of anemones had been reduced to half price. I can’t afford to buy flowers often these days, and very cheap daffodils are usually my limit (and even then I try to limit myself to half price ones that are already a bit wilted). When I saw the pink anemones, I knew I wanted to put them against a yellow or orange background to paint them. There were 7 blooms but one had a broken stem, and 3 looked the right number for the size of the vase.

My relationship with the vase

I assume that the vase was mass-produced for the Western market. It’s hand-painted, and I do feel a little anxious still that the person who painted it might have been paid very little, even though it was probably made decades ago. My mother has a teaset (inherited from her parents, I think) with very similar figures but on a brown background, so the imagery on it has been familiar to me since I was a baby. I noticed decorative china as a very small child. My grandmother had cups and saucer decorated with pink roses. Elderly relatives had a gold lustre coffee set in a china cabinet in their front parlour. I doubt that they ever used it.

Starting the still life – drawing and first colours

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 1, tinted charcoal on canvas, March 2014.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 2, acrylics and tinted charcoal on canvas, March 2014.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 3, acrylics and tinted charcoal on canvas, March 2014.

Thinking about the composition

I have deliberately chosen a composition that shouldn’t work. It is not balanced in terms of the placement of the vase and flowers and the detailed, multi-coloured part of the scarf that naturally attract one’s gaze. I’m interested to see how it will turn out. The anemones moved between the time I was drawing them and starting to put the paint on the blooms the next morning. The scarf slipped overnight. I like these movements. I don’t want to draw still lives that are perfectly still. I think that I would rather be painting people but since I have no human models, I am painting flowers, fruit, and things, and I would like some implication of movement in the compositions. I might explore making the movement explicit sometime in the future.

Thinking about influences

It would be easier to try to paint the flowers as 3D objects, rather than deliberately trying to keep the picture planes quite flat. What may not be at all obvious is that I have been looking at as much street art as I can over the past 5 years, and thinking about what I would do if I had the opportunity to paint on an external wall. I have also been looking at Pop Art again – especially British Pop Art and proto-Pop Art. This is a result of doing classes in the Hatton Gallery where we have focused on Pop Art and 1950s to early 1960s popular culture during some sessions, because of the exhibitions that they have been showing. I think this is filtering into how I’m thinking about painting currently, and is certainly helping me to think in ‘clean’ colours.

Back to work! I need to get on while there is daylight…

A day later

It’s difficult to photograph this painting so that the colours show properly. The little snapshot camera I have freaks out a bit at strong colour and white in the same picture. If I try to get the orange light enough, the paler areas bleach out, so try to imagine the large area of orange (it looks more scarlet in the picture below) being a bit lighter and slightly yellower.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 4, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.

About a week later…

I have had little time to work on this painting over the past week. I was away for a couple of days at the beginning of the week, and busy doing other things almost every moment during the rest of it.

There is still some way to go but I think, at this stage, that most of it is too close in hues – and I’m not sure that it works well enough. When I shared that thought on Twitter, several people promptly said that they loved the colours. The shapes and lines are doing more or less what I want to move my gaze around the canvas, but it feels to me as if slightly more oomph (sorry – that’s a very technical word) is required, a slight adjustment to a colour pull everything together. There is more to do yet. It may look different again when the dark lines are added to the scarf.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 5, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.

31st March

I went over the areas of pale bluish-green to even them out. Then I added the blues, went over the pinks of the petals and added some purple to the black centres of the flowers.

Then I considered it. I hesitated to add fluorescent green lines. Remembering that I need to take risks, I mixed the colour and started to add it in. I was quite sure I’d wrecked it as the lines seemed to glow almost in the fading light of evening. The fluorescent green lines looked rather tacky. I switched the lights on to photograph it and suddenly it didn’t look much brighter than the original pale green lines. The colours in the photos below are not quite accurate.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 6, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 7, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.

I will try photographing again in daylight. I don’t know what to expect. I might have to look at it for a few days to work out whether I like it.

3rd April

I started off with photographing the previous stage (picture below on the left) since it was daylight, even if not a bright level of light. I’m still not sure about the fluorescent green lines – whether they work or not – but they are growing on me.

Today, I concentrated on the detail of the figure on the vase before hesitating about whether to add the leaves to the green borders on the scarf. I decided to go ahead, and to add the black lines to the scarf’s ovals pattern. I didn’t quite finish that this afternoon, and was unsure that it worked.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 8, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.

Janet E Davis, 3 pink anemones in an oriental vase – stage 9, acrylics on canvas, March 2014.